I got some offline queries about RPG history. Victor Raymond, who plays in M.A.R. Barker's Thursday Night Game, wrote the article at the attached lnik; he hasn't followed it up with a part II yet but still plans to. There are some precedence quibbles one can offer, and I think Hargrave and Arduin deserved a brief mention in there somewhere, but basically this is a top-notch survey of some stuff that happened in the early days.

http://www.mage-page.com/history_of_gaming.shtml

But of course there's no substitute for actually reading the old games themselves. I remember reading a game review on rpg.net written within the last year where the reviewer praised the designer to the skies for an experience system which forces the players to spend their loot on a 'hobby' (wine, women, song, tinkering in their garage, etc.) before they cash in any experience points for it. "How creative and new, and what a good way to balance treasure and experience!", said the reviewer. Well, it is a great rule, and has been since Dave Arneson used it in his home games around the time D&D was first published or before, and published it for the first time in 1977 IIRC when Judges Guild collected Arneson's campaign notes for First Fantasy Campaign. (Which DA claims he never got paid for - some things never change.)

This is a must read. Lots of interesting tidbits, like H.G. Well's Little Wars. Thanks for posting it.

--Em

Yeah, I first encountered Fletcher Pratt through his fiction. In one of the forwards it described in some detail the dozens to scores of otherwise respectable adults who would gather in rented ball rooms and legion halls to play his naval rules. The ships were wooden models painstakingly carved to spec representing specific ships and played on the floor with movement measured by a string and gunfire by pointing arrows and writing estimates of range. It was so intrigueing that I went out to find a copy.

Other than the fact that it was written in the interwar years and didn't account for the revolution in naval aviation, its quite probably still one of the best naval mini rules sets out there.

But what gets me...is that at that time, local businessmen, politicians, professors, and the like wouldn't think anything strange about getting together and spending an entire afternoon pushing model ships around and blasting each other to pieces.

Emily Care wrote: This is a must read. Lots of interesting tidbits, like H.G. Well's Little Wars. Thanks for posting it.

Here is another fascinating history link:

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/search/LOTDETAIL.ASP?intObjectID=4205385

Notice the line, "Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used." I think we modern scholars might have some small clue!